> It's really just simple arbitrage: if the value of Bitcoin goes up, but the electricity cost doesn't, then you have essentially 2 different prices for 1 good,

> It's really just simple arbitrage: if the value of Bitcoin goes up, but the electricity cost doesn't, then you have essentially 2 different prices for 1 good, which should attract more miners to spend more money on electricity. And, indeed, this is exactly what has happened. How is this different from any other good or service? Is it bad only for bitcoin? > The problem, of course, is that if it takes an Argentina's worth of electricity to run Bitcoin now, how does the world manage if Bitcoin has a 10 or 100 times greater market cap? Obviously it can't, and world governments would rightly shut it all down before the majority of our electric output went to mining BTC. What is the problem with it? Do you know why oil has the price it has and why we built all the enormous infra structure to extract it? Because it is useful, and we can kinda measure it by its market cap. If the market cap of bitcoin is huge, that means that...... its usefulness is huge (or you can argue it is a bubble, but then it's a different argument). So the higher the market cap the more useful it is, and its a good thing. The profit and loss is what will tell if we are "wasting" resources or not, if it is profitable, then that means that people value bitcoin more than the electricity it uses, that is not a problem.